As part of an electronic music project in graduate school, I wrote an alternative score for a one-minute excerpt (9:20-10:23) from Alex Roman’s breathtaking short film, The Third & The Seventh. The video features Roman’s CG renderings of architecture, including the Phillips Exeter Academy Library and the Quadracci Pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The realism of his work is made more impressive by the fact that every aspect of the video, including sound and music production (except the composition itself), is solely Roman’s doing.

From a compositional standpoint, the piece is post-minimalist. Despite the artifice in the orchestration, it is extremely simple; it is based almost entirely around juxtaposing pairs of triads against one another. Each shot in the video roughly encompasses a different pair, which imply Dorian, Lydian, or Neapolitan-to-dominant relationships. The meter and tempo are underpinned by polyrhythmic ostinatos (three against two) and remain remarkably constant despite my close adherence to cues.